“No, we won’t quit—we’ll try it. And there’ll never be any word of reproach.”
Her face lighted up; she rose and came toward him and he held her close for a minute.
“We’ll go right now,” he said.
An hour later they drove away from the hotel, both of them momentarily cheered by the exhilaration of starting a journey, with the little car bulging with bags and new vistas opening up ahead. But in the afternoon as they curved down through Provence, they were silent for a while each with a separate thought. His thought was that he would never know—what her thought was must be left unfathomed—and perhaps unfathomable in that obscure pool in the bottom of every woman’s heart.
Toward evening as they reached the seaboard and turned east following a Riviera that twinkled with light, they came out of their separate selves and were cheerful together. When the stars were bright on the water he said:
“We’ll build our love up and not down.”
“I won’t have to build my love up,” she said loyally. “It’s up in the skies now.”
They came to the end of France at midnight and looked at each other with infinite hope as they crossed the bridge over into Italy, into the new sweet warm darkness.
Note
The story was written in Asheville in September 1935, with the working titles “Finishing School” and “A Course in Languages.” After the Post apparently declined it, it was finally published in McCall’s in April 1936. This story documents Fitzgerald’s difficulty in producing commercial stories during 1936-1937. It seems padded with sight-seeing to achieve the required magazine length.
